Efficient in whose eyes? I prefer a car that goes directly from point A to B on my schedule, to a train that has me walk or drive to point C, then get off at point D, then take a bus to get to point B. Perhaps you have a surplus of idle time to ride the choo-choo and see the sights, but some of us are working under a tighter schedule.
And those high barriers to entry are typically not an issue of acquiring sufficient capital, but acquiring the proper set of political friends with which to bypass the red tape.
See, the problem with your argument is that you are essentially arguing against the very definition of a free market. It is as if you're saying "Justice is awesome, but sometimes a judge or lawyer commits an injustice, so justice is actually unjust" : "Free markets are awesome, except sometimes the supporting machinary is corrupted, so free markets aren't free."
The understanding behind their definition is, at times, so ass-backwards among the common man, that it almost qualifies as one of the Evil Overlord rules: "If I am a ruler of a country, I will routinely hire young men to climb the village tower and denounce me; thus, when a real hero comes along, he will find no aid from among my populace." -> "If I am sitting high and pretty in the market through various underhanded processes, and the only real challenge to me is that the populace might embrace a variant of economics that might dethrone me, I will do everything in my power to have the leaders of companies and governments alike routinely proclaim that that variant of economics is responsible for all the 'good' they are currently experiencing; thus when someone actually tries to change the system of economics to that which I do not desire, the populace will rise up as one against him, thinking that they are preventing things from getting worse, and thus securing my throne for me at their expense."
Nonsense, the variant of processor can matter, but software must be written to take advantage of it, and what more, to provide a true advantage. Compiling something with the Intel compiler, where x87 code is used for AMD processors, isn't a true advantage of Intel processors -> those AMD processors support those SSE instructions, and a quick recompile / change of the flags destroys your temporary advantage.
What makes many other types of processor quick ass over the x86 variants? Typically fun things like double-digits of registers or special instructions that can do in one cycle what x86 do in ten. But you can't rest on your laurels. You can't ship a new chip with a slight speed boost, while others are trouncing your platform, and cross your fingers that companies are too heavily invested in Sparc to transition to a different chip. Your sales guys cut better deals, with happier customers, when the stuff they're selling isn't crap. Cut back on R&D or tech too much, and you turn into another oem who is competing on price alone (a dangerous place to be). When people look to your company, they need to know that the tech is as safe as houses, the deal they're getting isn't bullsh*t, and that the support contracts won't be outsourced to someone who hasn't personally built one of the servers they're supporting.
Nonsense./. is about what IT people tend to think. If anything, it's refreshing to read what has been so painfully hidden on every other news / discussion site. It's almost like someone threatened them with an immediate removal of ad dollars if they didn't taught the cheeriest of interviews, while their chief technical contributors are fighting for a chance to use the defibrillator machine in the back after they thought about how badly Windows 8 is going to crash their stock portfolios. Put bluntly, the GUI for Windows 8 is designed for 'tards! People who get confused if their computer is doing more than one thing at a time, the kind of people who see overlapping windows and look under their desk for the ones underneath ("They've got to be under here somewhere"). And despite the amazing success of the MS Marketing team to threaten or otherwise shutdown any amount of opposition to the new heir to the MS throne, most of IT and its major pundits are desperately trying to figure out whether Windows 8 is some sort of April Fools joke that Ballmer is playing on the rest of us. If we had to make a choice today between Windows 8 and Vista, we'd choose Vista! You hear that? It's the sound of the tech industry pundits having to choose between being on MS's naughty list for the next 3 years, or losing any credibility they have.
And enter the new hell where you need to support 12 different browsers across 25 versions. Nothing says love like having to support Safari (Mac users), Firefox, Chrome, Opera, Internet Explorer (6-9?), and so on users these days.
I'll take the fights with the local libraries over this nonsense. Three platforms? Only a few versions to each? I can live with that. It's when you write your app in HTML5, and someone's browser doesn't support it, that you hear it.
For an extra $300, most PC makers are willing to have someone drive out to your house, and repair your computer while you watch.
I got to see that with one of my old Dells. Perhaps 5 times? The UWXGA screens they were selling were top notch, but they fractured waaaay too easily, and I'm kind of neurotic about my pixels. If they had just worked a screen protector into the design, like most laptops have now, they could have saved themselves so much trouble.
Now I have an HP Envy 17 laptop, which depending on what happens when I try to find out why the one side, near the screen hinge, is popping out when I try to hold it in one hand (it's an aluminum case, very nice; I upgraded the RAM to 16 GBs, and swapped in a 240 GB SSD, which may or may not explain the slight misalignment (perhaps I forgot to tighten a screw?)), I may be testing their warranty. I'm a little PO'ed that it only has a 76xx video card, and their new ones have 78xx cards, which means I may or may not have a video card / motherboard upgrade on the horizon. The only real pity with this thing is that the video card drivers are updated via the HP website instead of AMD (Why!?!). And I still have room for a mSATA device...
Gah, a 128 GB isn't nearly enough. I have a 240 GB SSD in my current laptop (HP Envy 17), which I have filled about half of (just with apps), and a second HD (750 GBs) which is slowly filling up.
The hell are you people doing that you're only using 60 GBs? The Adobe Master Collection alone sucks up several GBs.
That's because the various founders of those companies sold out a long time ago. They aren't even run by techs anymore...they're just run by rotating door execs who are trying to find some pennies under the couch that the others missed, with no real vision ("Uh, yeah, let's do what everyone else has done! A tablet, but with our logo on it! Yeah!"), although though that may be, arguably, better than what some of the Jean-Luc Picard wannabes have thought up ("I have had a totally brilliant idea! Let's give our customers a bigger emote package, and a 3 week free trial to a music service we run ourselves!").
1.) Intellectual property: Patents and such that have not yet been filed, will inevitably be revealed in published documents. I believe that a few lawyers have used this to their advantage, using the courts to subpoena a corporation over something that forces them to reveal sensitive information, and which once entered on the court's records, is considered public information. It's all fun and games until a particularly intelligent lawyer convinces a judge to reveal a corporation's electrolyte formula. But then, anyone who knows lawyers knows that they spend hours idly dreaming up ways to use the courts to their advantage.
2.) Incomplete information: a scientist performs an experiment that appears to have run properly, but finds reason to run it again (something about the results leaves him / her to believe that an error has been made somewhere (neutron decay is 50 times higher than predicted, something like that); by ordering its release, unnecessary confusion may be created, as well as the appearance of a scandal (he / she was engaged in a coverup!), and we all know how terrible the very technically-minded scientists can be when placed in the court of opinion (0.5 rems? radiation? omg, it's another Chernobyl / Fukushima!). The amount of facepalming that would occur here could have serious medical repercussions.
Last I checked, it's somewhat trivial to make your own propellent. We're talking high school level chemistry here, which I note with some dissatisfaction a number of educators are considering dropping, which may be why some people are considering what used to be considered a basic foundation to the sciences as magic these days. No doubt, we are entering an era where the use of a dictionary will soon qualify in a similar manner.
Oh please! The DoD has been aware since, I don't know, the 1980s that anything important is not hooked up the public internet. I imagine that if they've been following their own doctrine, it's a treasonous offense to put any material not for public consumption on an internet-accessible machine, whether or not they think it's publicly accessible. Hell, it's been a long standing joke in the hacker / cracker communities -> "So tell me again, PH3@RMe, how you hacked a FBI / CIA / DoD server and got access to some uber-elite secret files" with full knowledge that nothing important is kept on those servers, and defacing the website (or serving up pr0n / warez on the FTP) is simply for bragging rights.
Frankly I wouldn't be surprised if the web servers for many of these organizations lacked a hard drive, and booted purely from a burned DVD. Just reboot the machine whenever the checksums on the files change.
Hmm, I'd imagine sales would be more high pressure. Marketing requires outsourcing demographic studies and ensuring that you attract some attention without offending anyone. Sales requires reading people / their reactions with split timing, and being able to close a deal.
Marketing is filled with the 'beautiful people,' and Sales is filled with the people who give off the oddball wavelength that you can 'trust' them, or when that fails, that you're still getting a 'deal' out of the proposed arrangement.
Indeed. I have no idea who this person is, yet having read his post, I am now convinced that he missed out on a bigger lesson.
My take-away thoughts: if I'd lost out on $100 million in stock options, I'd probably be fairly pissed as well. And his arguments are kind of backwards / contradict themselves: what he's really saying is "don't be replaceable -> work on as much of the core product as possible, as opposed to trying to be 'friends' with everyone around the office, as being the company dandy won't save you from being fired, but having written (and potentially not fully documented) the core code-base will." What he wrote was "everyone is replaceable" and "I should have spent more time working on the main product than schmoozing."
But then, a fair number of people know this, having studied Aesop's fables -> only an idiot kills the goose that lays the golden eggs, or in modern parlance, only a class A mistake in human evolution fires the main engineer / scientist that actually knows in and out the core product that your company sells / is responsible for your good fortune (not that we haven't seen many a higher up think that someone was accumulating too much power, fire them on pretense, then run around screaming while the company burned down to the ground because his / her replacement(s) would have to spend 5 years taking apart their predecessor's work before they'd gain enough understanding of its inner workings to be able to modify it without destroying it).
So, I'm late to the party. Did Zuck fire him to get the $100 million back? One of those "Oh Shit, we've given out too many stock options, we need to do something to get some of it back" kind of deals? Always, always, assume the worst will happen when pursing a job offer. Any potential intellectual property is purposefully mentioned and locked out, and stock options are kept and vested independent on continued employment, save you are charged with a capital crime (like offing the company founder). Arbitration is handled by an objective third-party, and no conflict of employment (working for one of their competitors) agreements signed without compensation for the time spent not working. And so on...
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Efficient in whose eyes? I prefer a car that goes directly from point A to B on my schedule, to a train that has me walk or drive to point C, then get off at point D, then take a bus to get to point B. Perhaps you have a surplus of idle time to ride the choo-choo and see the sights, but some of us are working under a tighter schedule.
Shhhhh. His idea of a free market is that it's run by the private sector, not by the public sector.
"You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means."
And those high barriers to entry are typically not an issue of acquiring sufficient capital, but acquiring the proper set of political friends with which to bypass the red tape.
See, the problem with your argument is that you are essentially arguing against the very definition of a free market. It is as if you're saying "Justice is awesome, but sometimes a judge or lawyer commits an injustice, so justice is actually unjust" : "Free markets are awesome, except sometimes the supporting machinary is corrupted, so free markets aren't free."
The understanding behind their definition is, at times, so ass-backwards among the common man, that it almost qualifies as one of the Evil Overlord rules: "If I am a ruler of a country, I will routinely hire young men to climb the village tower and denounce me; thus, when a real hero comes along, he will find no aid from among my populace." -> "If I am sitting high and pretty in the market through various underhanded processes, and the only real challenge to me is that the populace might embrace a variant of economics that might dethrone me, I will do everything in my power to have the leaders of companies and governments alike routinely proclaim that that variant of economics is responsible for all the 'good' they are currently experiencing; thus when someone actually tries to change the system of economics to that which I do not desire, the populace will rise up as one against him, thinking that they are preventing things from getting worse, and thus securing my throne for me at their expense."
There you go with your logic and reasoning again.
Perhaps we need to make current vehicles more upgradeable?
Odd, I had thought they'd developed a scheme for sending power from various sources. Perhaps I misread?
I take it you don't see anything wrong with that statement.
If it's outpacing inflation, as he pointed out, then it is increasing in real dollars.
Huh, I thought they discovered an asymmetric process a little while back.
Heh. Then perhaps we should look into getting an ammonia-based atmospheric cooling system, like some of our outer planet neighbors.
Need to build one != will build one.
So, someone setup a crowd-tilt campaign or something to get together the money to get these things launched.
Nonsense, the variant of processor can matter, but software must be written to take advantage of it, and what more, to provide a true advantage. Compiling something with the Intel compiler, where x87 code is used for AMD processors, isn't a true advantage of Intel processors -> those AMD processors support those SSE instructions, and a quick recompile / change of the flags destroys your temporary advantage.
What makes many other types of processor quick ass over the x86 variants? Typically fun things like double-digits of registers or special instructions that can do in one cycle what x86 do in ten. But you can't rest on your laurels. You can't ship a new chip with a slight speed boost, while others are trouncing your platform, and cross your fingers that companies are too heavily invested in Sparc to transition to a different chip. Your sales guys cut better deals, with happier customers, when the stuff they're selling isn't crap. Cut back on R&D or tech too much, and you turn into another oem who is competing on price alone (a dangerous place to be). When people look to your company, they need to know that the tech is as safe as houses, the deal they're getting isn't bullsh*t, and that the support contracts won't be outsourced to someone who hasn't personally built one of the servers they're supporting.
Nonsense. /. is about what IT people tend to think. If anything, it's refreshing to read what has been so painfully hidden on every other news / discussion site. It's almost like someone threatened them with an immediate removal of ad dollars if they didn't taught the cheeriest of interviews, while their chief technical contributors are fighting for a chance to use the defibrillator machine in the back after they thought about how badly Windows 8 is going to crash their stock portfolios. Put bluntly, the GUI for Windows 8 is designed for 'tards! People who get confused if their computer is doing more than one thing at a time, the kind of people who see overlapping windows and look under their desk for the ones underneath ("They've got to be under here somewhere"). And despite the amazing success of the MS Marketing team to threaten or otherwise shutdown any amount of opposition to the new heir to the MS throne, most of IT and its major pundits are desperately trying to figure out whether Windows 8 is some sort of April Fools joke that Ballmer is playing on the rest of us. If we had to make a choice today between Windows 8 and Vista, we'd choose Vista! You hear that? It's the sound of the tech industry pundits having to choose between being on MS's naughty list for the next 3 years, or losing any credibility they have.
And enter the new hell where you need to support 12 different browsers across 25 versions. Nothing says love like having to support Safari (Mac users), Firefox, Chrome, Opera, Internet Explorer (6-9?), and so on users these days.
I'll take the fights with the local libraries over this nonsense. Three platforms? Only a few versions to each? I can live with that. It's when you write your app in HTML5, and someone's browser doesn't support it, that you hear it.
For an extra $300, most PC makers are willing to have someone drive out to your house, and repair your computer while you watch.
I got to see that with one of my old Dells. Perhaps 5 times? The UWXGA screens they were selling were top notch, but they fractured waaaay too easily, and I'm kind of neurotic about my pixels. If they had just worked a screen protector into the design, like most laptops have now, they could have saved themselves so much trouble.
Now I have an HP Envy 17 laptop, which depending on what happens when I try to find out why the one side, near the screen hinge, is popping out when I try to hold it in one hand (it's an aluminum case, very nice; I upgraded the RAM to 16 GBs, and swapped in a 240 GB SSD, which may or may not explain the slight misalignment (perhaps I forgot to tighten a screw?)), I may be testing their warranty. I'm a little PO'ed that it only has a 76xx video card, and their new ones have 78xx cards, which means I may or may not have a video card / motherboard upgrade on the horizon. The only real pity with this thing is that the video card drivers are updated via the HP website instead of AMD (Why!?!). And I still have room for a mSATA device...
And (continuing down this road) you do know that Windows NT, while not certified as a UNIX, does qualify as one?
Gah, a 128 GB isn't nearly enough. I have a 240 GB SSD in my current laptop (HP Envy 17), which I have filled about half of (just with apps), and a second HD (750 GBs) which is slowly filling up.
The hell are you people doing that you're only using 60 GBs? The Adobe Master Collection alone sucks up several GBs.
That's because the various founders of those companies sold out a long time ago. They aren't even run by techs anymore...they're just run by rotating door execs who are trying to find some pennies under the couch that the others missed, with no real vision ("Uh, yeah, let's do what everyone else has done! A tablet, but with our logo on it! Yeah!"), although though that may be, arguably, better than what some of the Jean-Luc Picard wannabes have thought up ("I have had a totally brilliant idea! Let's give our customers a bigger emote package, and a 3 week free trial to a music service we run ourselves!").
Who buys larger ram / HDDs from the computer manufacturer? Why would you do that to yourself?
Takes 15 minutes with a screwdriver to perform the upgrade yourself, arguably with better hardware, while saving yourself a mint.
Two possible reasons:
1.) Intellectual property: Patents and such that have not yet been filed, will inevitably be revealed in published documents. I believe that a few lawyers have used this to their advantage, using the courts to subpoena a corporation over something that forces them to reveal sensitive information, and which once entered on the court's records, is considered public information. It's all fun and games until a particularly intelligent lawyer convinces a judge to reveal a corporation's electrolyte formula. But then, anyone who knows lawyers knows that they spend hours idly dreaming up ways to use the courts to their advantage.
2.) Incomplete information: a scientist performs an experiment that appears to have run properly, but finds reason to run it again (something about the results leaves him / her to believe that an error has been made somewhere (neutron decay is 50 times higher than predicted, something like that); by ordering its release, unnecessary confusion may be created, as well as the appearance of a scandal (he / she was engaged in a coverup!), and we all know how terrible the very technically-minded scientists can be when placed in the court of opinion (0.5 rems? radiation? omg, it's another Chernobyl / Fukushima!). The amount of facepalming that would occur here could have serious medical repercussions.
Last I checked, it's somewhat trivial to make your own propellent. We're talking high school level chemistry here, which I note with some dissatisfaction a number of educators are considering dropping, which may be why some people are considering what used to be considered a basic foundation to the sciences as magic these days. No doubt, we are entering an era where the use of a dictionary will soon qualify in a similar manner.
Oh please! The DoD has been aware since, I don't know, the 1980s that anything important is not hooked up the public internet. I imagine that if they've been following their own doctrine, it's a treasonous offense to put any material not for public consumption on an internet-accessible machine, whether or not they think it's publicly accessible. Hell, it's been a long standing joke in the hacker / cracker communities -> "So tell me again, PH3@RMe, how you hacked a FBI / CIA / DoD server and got access to some uber-elite secret files" with full knowledge that nothing important is kept on those servers, and defacing the website (or serving up pr0n / warez on the FTP) is simply for bragging rights.
Frankly I wouldn't be surprised if the web servers for many of these organizations lacked a hard drive, and booted purely from a burned DVD. Just reboot the machine whenever the checksums on the files change.
Hmm, I'd imagine sales would be more high pressure. Marketing requires outsourcing demographic studies and ensuring that you attract some attention without offending anyone. Sales requires reading people / their reactions with split timing, and being able to close a deal.
Marketing is filled with the 'beautiful people,' and Sales is filled with the people who give off the oddball wavelength that you can 'trust' them, or when that fails, that you're still getting a 'deal' out of the proposed arrangement.
Indeed. I have no idea who this person is, yet having read his post, I am now convinced that he missed out on a bigger lesson.
My take-away thoughts: if I'd lost out on $100 million in stock options, I'd probably be fairly pissed as well. And his arguments are kind of backwards / contradict themselves: what he's really saying is "don't be replaceable -> work on as much of the core product as possible, as opposed to trying to be 'friends' with everyone around the office, as being the company dandy won't save you from being fired, but having written (and potentially not fully documented) the core code-base will." What he wrote was "everyone is replaceable" and "I should have spent more time working on the main product than schmoozing."
But then, a fair number of people know this, having studied Aesop's fables -> only an idiot kills the goose that lays the golden eggs, or in modern parlance, only a class A mistake in human evolution fires the main engineer / scientist that actually knows in and out the core product that your company sells / is responsible for your good fortune (not that we haven't seen many a higher up think that someone was accumulating too much power, fire them on pretense, then run around screaming while the company burned down to the ground because his / her replacement(s) would have to spend 5 years taking apart their predecessor's work before they'd gain enough understanding of its inner workings to be able to modify it without destroying it).
So, I'm late to the party. Did Zuck fire him to get the $100 million back? One of those "Oh Shit, we've given out too many stock options, we need to do something to get some of it back" kind of deals? Always, always, assume the worst will happen when pursing a job offer. Any potential intellectual property is purposefully mentioned and locked out, and stock options are kept and vested independent on continued employment, save you are charged with a capital crime (like offing the company founder). Arbitration is handled by an objective third-party, and no conflict of employment (working for one of their competitors) agreements signed without compensation for the time spent not working. And so on...